4024

Apple Arcade is great. It’s got some spruced up versions of older games like Angry Birds and Tiny Wings, but also some new stuff like a Lego Star Wars game that my 9 year old is hooked on. There’s at least 4 Lego based games on there.

I’ve gotten a lot of gameplay personally from Kingdom Rush Frontiers, Cozy Grove, Grindstone, Mini Metro/Motorway, and Good Sudoku.

On a kid’s educational front, my 3 year old taught herself to read from Khan Academy Kids.

4025

Any word on Beast Breaker for iOS, @Nightgaunt?

(Or anywhere else?)

4026

Sorry, iOS is not in the cards at the moment. We’re on to the next game!

4027

Interesting, thanks for the update. I am curious, although I am sure you can’t talk about it, but I would love to know why. You guys who had a huge iOS hit, but are not releasing games on it now. If I had to guess, it’s because you guys got completely ripped off by clones.

4028

It doesn’t have much to do with Threes, honestly. Mostly a matter of where we perceive the strongest audience for that kind of game is, and the market for premium games on mobile platforms. No denying it could play pretty well on a touchscreen, though!

4029

Glad to hear you guys aren’t bitter about that clone thing. That got pretty bad and Apple let it happen. Thanks for answering, I can put my conspiracy theories to rest.

4030

Haha, well, it was not really our studio that made Threes, just the founder, Asher (with a couple others, including our composer). Apple did bring Threes onto Apple Arcade and not any of those clones; I’m not going to ascribe it to any kind of remorse on their part, but there’s that at least.

4031

Digital version of Maracaibo is out on IOS:

4032

Rocket Leage Sideswipe is surprisingly great. Been playing it every day since it came out. Even works pretty well with touch screen controls.

It’s just 100% free right now. They’ll obviously add IAP / battle passes / etc. in the future like the console/PC game has, but right now it’s just totally free, so no harm in trying it out :-)

4033

Wait…what!!! How in the world did I miss that one of m favoritist games by one of my favoritist designers has a digital version.

4034

That icon is quite the repellant, to be fair XD

Why is the game good to you Tyjenks? I don’t know anything about it.

4035

Yeah, sharing it on Facebook from the app store shows the same stupid icon.

Alexander Pfister, designs games which do a bunch of different things. None of the individual mechanics are too complex, but the way he weaves them together (Mombasa, Great Wester Trail another two of my favorite games he also designed) makes it quite a bit to learn and keep up with. It is kinda difficult to explain specifically as on the surface, the premise and descriptions of his games are relatively simple. However the gameplay has you juggling multiple different ways to score.

In Maracaibo, you have to buy and sell goods and go on expeditions and help fight battles and take over islands for the three countries vying for control. All of this while expanding the things you can do on your turn via your own play board that gives you multiple options to upgrade your ship.

EDIT: Oh, and there are cards. Cards that represent people who can help. Cards that provide locations that allow you to do various things. Then you can build synergies bases on shared icons across some of the cards that give you bonuses. And there is a victory point income track and an monetary income track that you can build up and maybe focus on those to help you score.

You can probably Google someone who can tell you better. Basically, I like juggling a bunch of things and finding a new way to do well based a bit on the randomness of the game, what others are doing and what you choose to do differently each game.

People that like to analyze extensively to take a turn, might find it a lot and possibly too annoying. That is the case with a lot of heavier, Euro games. Of course with a digital version, you can take all the time you want and I have played the campaign solo quite a bit and it adds stuff with each game you play. Not a lot, but enough to tweak the gameplay so that it evolves and you play consecutive games.

I’ve started the video. I’ll report back on how representative it is, but I can’t imagine learning the digital version and then showing it to people without the entirety of the board and everyone’s individual shipboards in front of them. There are a lot of little things that he probably simply does not explain in a review format.

Set up for this takes 15 minutes or so live and teaching can easily take 30 minutes. And usually, you can’t really get the hang of a strategy until halfway through or at the end of your first game. It really merits multiple plays and so I am excited to try this digitally as it will save so much time. As I alluded to above, learning digitally may be a bit of a challenge due to the complexity and the smaller viewable area as there is a lot going on on the board and your board.

I am definitely going to buy it when I get home and will report back. Sounds like there is no digital A.I. and it just uses the automa (boardgame solo rules and cards that attempts to simulate an opponent but cuts out a lot of the busy work). As someone who has played the boardgame, that is perfectly fine with me as it makes sense and works very well in the physical version.

Anyway, I’ve just sort of rambled while at work so I am sure this doesn’t help at all. :)

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4036

Oh it does! The store page made it sound like gloomhaven, and it’s clearly not. From your description, I know I will be too challenged to learn it (I am a very bad learner of games in general, having a very hard time to understand the slightest thing from a manual without a veteran handholding me through whole games).
30 minutes to learn doesn’t sound too bad, I’ll ask my boardgaming family if they own it, because that Sid Meier’s Pirates Spanish Main map is my jam.
Thankie!

4037

Yeah, it has a bit of evolution of the game in the campaign I mentioned, but very little like Gloomhaven otherwise. The game is also built to work perfectly well for one off games and that is the way I recommend people learn it and that is the way I have played it with others. I am happy to answer any other questions as I truly love this game and just about everything of Pfister’s that I have played and I am still short 4 or 5 as he has been around a while and is amazingly prolific considering the complexity of his games and the variety of mechanics he includes. I could gush all day.

Mombasa was one of the first heavier games I played and it is still one of my favorites. Great Western Trail is probably a bit more similar to this and it is also an excellent game. I’ve taught all three of these and they are all quite the challenge if you have not played in a bit as I thought I’d teach Maracaibo a couple months ago at a meetup and then it wasn’t really all coming back. Luckily, another guy there had played recently.

EDIT: I am not alone in my love for the designer. BGG Rankings for the three games I mentioned.

-12. Great Western Trail
-38. Maracaibo
-89. Mombasa

Isle of Skye (#219) is also a bit lighter and has some Carcassone-esque elements and a cool bidding mechanism to add tiles to your own Kingdom as you compete with others doing the same.It has a great digital adaptation as well.

EDIT again: There is a digital tutorial which I will “relearn” with and can hopefully determine how much it would help a brand new player.

4038

The Maracibo tutorial is pretty good all things considered. It doesn’t try to teach you everything at once and layers on the rules and mechanics as it walks you through the first two of four rounds. I had some interruptions, but the tutorial took about 45 minutes, but, again, that was two full rounds of the game with me relearning the ropes.

I do think some of the mechanics are harder to understand and may not be explained completely clearly as they tripped me up when learning the physical version.

  1. You draw cards and have them in your hand, but they do nothing for you until you “buy” them. So drawing and buying (playing) them are two different things.

  2. With combat, you get these combat pieces that show you various combat values for the three countries for whom you can choose to fight. Those values are actually what you use as your combat power and then you perform actions with that amount of combat power rather than face off against an opposing nation. Your reward can be money, influence with that nation or victory points. There are multiple options within that based on your circumstance and what you want to do.

Those things may be clear to people who do the tutorial, but just thought I’d mention them as two of the more confusing (to me) mechanics.

I played two games against the medium Automa. There are five levels and the only difference is the number of stronger cards in the opponent’s deck. There are three different automa decks, each having increasingly more powerful cards. I lost both games. :)

The Automa scoring is still a little hard to follow unless you take time to walk through exactly what they are doing a re-read how their scoring works, which I need to doagain.

Not having everything in front of you is an expected irritant, but it is one that cannot be helped and they have done a fairly good job of allowing you to see the other areas of the virtual board. Although, strangely enough, I couldn’t figure out how to look at my ship and its upgrades. I’ll find that, I am sure.

Anyway, I won’t ramble any more unless someone actually has questions. It’s a faithful adaptation. Most of the reviews knock it for not having an A.I., but they tell you up front, that’s not what the game is. It uses boardgame, Automa, solo rules that attempt to simulate what a human appointment would end up doing using streamlined rules rather than having to have A.I. opponents who must walk through a much more complex decision tree that, in many computer versions, does not actually simulate you would find in a human opponent. I get that it would be nice to have that option, but I still think it’s silly to complain about. If you want it, cool, tell the developer and maybe they will do that.

I’ll play a couple more games against the Automa and then start the campaign. I am super happy with the faithful adaptation and don’t really have any complaints yet.

4039

Never played he original, but this is pretty cool.

4040

Joe Danger is great, play it!

4041

Looking for a few IOS games good for working out on a treadmill or execise bicycle. Can’t be twitch games. Need to be turn-based. I like deckbuilders, card games, TBS, etc.

XCOM is too detailed. I can’t do all the moves and aiming while in motion on a treadmill. Something like Slay the Spire or something like the old Advance Wars is also good.

Any suggestions are welcome. Thanks.

4042

If you’d be playing on a big fat iPad, Through the Ages might fit the bill. It’s a pretty information-dense screen, though. I play it on my iPad mini, but only when it’s right in front of my face.

4043

You might give motorsport manager a try. There is a lot of just watching, and not so much clicking, there are very few times you actually have to react to something, and it can be paused. Gameplay loop is building you team and drivers and facility up, and lightly managing races. I found it pretty fun, even though it’s fairly simple to deal with.